donkey kong country shennanigans

on impulse, i replayed most of Donkey Kong Country 2 yesterday, a thing that... did not take very long, because it turns out I Am Ridiculously Good At This Game. (it's the love of my childhood and all that.)

i did not think this game could still surprise me, but it did! or rather, the platform i was playing it on did.

see, i was playing on the SNES emulator on the Nintendo Switch, and there's a "rewind" function built-in, right? it lets you reset back to wherever you want within the past ~minute of gameplay.

i'd played this game in an emulator before, but had never actually used savestate features or anything, out of a combo of "too proud to cheat" and "too lazy to figure out the settings/shortcuts." but, since the rewind feature was right there, i started using it just a little bit, here and there, and...

it made the game easier, of course, but i expected that. what i didn't expect was how it... radically changed the nature of what the game even was?

like, i didn't realize how much caution/care/attention there is in my usual approach to even bog-standard levels, until i just... didn't need those things at all. within minutes i found myself changing my entire playstyle, trying out the wildest shit, doing really meme-y jumps and aggressively fast moves just to see if i could pull them off, because hey what the hell why not.

and it's cool! you can finish the game much faster, and it's rewarding in its own way! i'm very glad the option is there!

but it's definitely not the same experience. doesn't give the same types of satisfaction or reward the types of patience/attention it does when playing normally.

(my partner compared it to top roping versus lead climbing, for any rock climbers in the room, haha—when you're on top rope you can just kinda Do Random Shit, but mistakes/falls are way more annoying/painful when doing lead climbing, so you climb way more by-the-books.)

i don't have a larger point here; i was just pretty surprised how much even a little tweak can change the whole flavor/experience of the gameplay even in a bog-standard 2d platformer. (i guess i got some unexpected sympathy for my friend who mostly likes Crufty Old Arcade Games That Take Forever To Master, haha. i like that games are generally easier now, but he did really lose something when we were no longer feeding quarters into machines :P)

here's your creepy nature fact of the day

a few weeks ago i was birding with a friend, and while we didn't see many birds—bad weather, bad time of year—we did see one bizarre/cool bit of insect interaction.

we were watching a spider making its web, when a big black flying arthropod slammed into it—full-body, full-force, knocking the spider clean out of the web, right?

we then found the spider on the ground, looking like it was spasming/flailing a bit, then saw the arthropod slam into it again—and this time, the arthropod stayed on top of the spider until the spider stopped moving.

"that's some fucked up red-in-tooth-and-claw shit," we said to ourselves, and moved on, but—

some later research indicates what we probably saw was a parasitic wasp? which is the most messed-up sci-fi spooky thing i've learned about in a while—basically, there's so much goddamn biomass in the form of arthropods roaming around, that it makes sense for species to evolve to exploit that biomass, and thus, you'll get a species of parasitic wasp that specifically lays its eggs in a specific species of spider (eventually killing the spider), and a different species of parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in some other species of spider...

freaky designer-drug hyper-targeted-bio-killer shit! but also, what an incredibly fascinating find? nature is so weird. i love birding because even if i dip on an owl i can learn new fucked-up things about insects and that's almost as cool lol